Between the Outsound Festival and other things going on here at CatSynth, we barely had time to squeeze in Weekend Cat Blogging.
I returned home briefly last night between various events to rest for a moment and of course to spend a few minutes Luna. With camera already in hand and made a few photos of Luna near our favorite glass-and-metal table. It caught a bit of blue in the reflection, and inspired me to make this image with everything but the blue reduced to grayscale:
Later that evening, I encountered some feline themed art:
This is a moment from a 3D film/video by Kerry Laitala that was screened last night at SOMArts. I did not see the kitten featured on the exhibition website, though. I will have a review of the full event at SOMArts soon.
Aside from brief excursions in photography and visual art, the last few days have been dominated by music. For each of the groups I am working with, wehave compositions that we print on paper and then read during rehearsals and performances. It is a lot of work.
But is sheet music tasty?
On the subject of tasty treats, our friends Kashim, Othello, Salome and Astrid are hosting special edition of WCB dedicated to Sher, who passed away unexpectedly two years ago. In addition to being a dedicated and supportive member of Weekend Cat Blogging, she was also a food blogger who published many recipes which I have used over the last few years. We will go back to the archives and try some more as soon as things calm down a bit and we have time for luxuries like well-prepared home-cooked meals.
Starting tomorrow, and throughout next week, I will be involved in the Outsound Music Summit here in San Francisco. In addition to participating as a performing artist, CatSynth is an official community media sponsor of the festival! I will attending (almost) all of the events, providing some live updates via Twitter, and of course more detailed reviews here on the blog. For those who wish to follow along, you can join us on Twitter @CatSynth, or subscribe to our feed, or simply check back in to the site periodically.
In terms of participating in the events themselves, I will be at the Touch the Gear Expo on Sunday. I am not yet sure the exact list of gear I will present, but it will almost certainly include the Monome, the Kaoss Pad and the Evolver.
On Saturday (that’s tomorrow), I will be performing with Reconnaissance Fly live on KFJC Radio. The performance is listed as 4PM U.S. Pacific Time, and is available online.
Finally, on Friday, July 23, I will be performing at the summit, both with Reconnaissance Fly and the Cornelius Cardew Choir.
Polly Moller’s collected and adapted spoetry texts form the basis for a new “spong cycle” — a song cycle based on spoetry. Entitled “Flower Futures”, this otherworldly ten-movement work shifts constantly in imagery and sound. Movements feature free improvisation, graphic scores, and full scored music, each with a spoem as its basis. Reconnaissance Fly, consisting of Moller plus Amar Chaudhary (keyboards and electronics) and Tim Walters (bass guitar and electronics) will perform “Flower Futures” along with special guest concussionist Moe! Staiano.
The Cornelius Cardew Choir is a SF Bay Area-based vocal performance ensemble. Situated at the intersection of community & experimental music, these professional, amateur, & novice singers work collectively to turn ideas into sonic action. The Choir’s set will include “Genesis” for twelve improvisers by Polly Moller, with the composer herself portraying the New Universe.
The piece I had commissioned from artist Flora Davis was completed in late June:
The metal surfaces of each box are glued and covered in a protective layer, and the sides are finished with a metallic paint.
The piece now also has a title: For Luna. It seems appropriate, as both Davis and I have cats named Luna. And of course it is a nice tribute.
You can see previous articles documenting the progress here and here.
It was exciting to see it complete and take it home. The final step will be to display the artwork. Combined with the companion cat painting Zeus, the five boxes can be arranged in any number of ways. Here are but a few examples:
The themes of this month here at CatSynth are health and creativity, and we reflect on those themes for Weekend Cat Blogging.
We have started a recent phase in our beginning yoga practice centered on opening up creativity, prosperity and opportunity. It is of course also good exercise and helpful for health and well being. Luna enjoys joining in, too:
Photography continues to be a central form of creative expression, even as I need to balance it with music, especially with several more shows coming up this month. Luna obliged me earlier this week by posing in front of one of the patio sculptures on a warm afternoon:
I got several great photos from this session, one of them appeared earlier this week during Wordless Wednesday. Here is a small version, but readers are encouraged to check out the larger version in the WW post.
Weekend Cat Blogging #265 will be hosted by Jules and Vincent. Because of the Independence Day holiday here in the U.S., the roundup will be up on July 5.
The Carnival of the Cats, will be up tomorrow, July 4, at Mind of Mog.
Nikita Cat will be hosting the monthly Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos on July 4 as well.
We at CatSynth are participating in Theano’s Day, an event to celebrate women in Philosophy. It is named in honor of Theano, the wife of the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras but also a scholar in her own right. In addition to promoting the work of Pythagoras, she put together her own work on mathematics, art, and beauty, all topics that are a regular part of this site. She is often credited with developing the Golden Mean, one of the most well-known ideas in aesthetic theory in which art, whether spacial (painting, sculpture, architecture) or temporal (music, drama) include structural elements based on the golden ratio φ, which is the ratio a / b such that a / b = (a + b) / a.
The number appears in the Fibonacci series as well, and in the well-known spiral that is used to describe proportions in nature and in architecture:
Theano is also credited with writings about child rearing and gender (although I am having difficulty finding a reference to this). Gender identity seems to permeate the work of many female philosophers over the centuries, indeed it seems to be an inescapable topic. The seventeenth century scholar and artist Anna Maria van Schurman published Whether the Study of Letters Is Fitting for a Christian Woman? in which she argued in favor of women’s education. In the modern era, there is of courseSimone de Beauvoir whose writing is considered foundational for contemporary feminism. But I am personally more interested in the treatment of gender as it relates to other philosophical and intellectual topics rather than social, political or biological. How does the concept of “the feminine” relate to existentialism in de Beauvoir’s novels, or to Schurman’s art or Theano’s mathematics? This is not a topic that can easily be covered in a single post, or on a single day, but relates deeply to some of the directions I am exploring in visual art (i.e., photography) and perhaps later on in music as well. So perhaps the best way to see this day is as a beginning…
As I have for the past two years, I will be attending the Garden of Memory walk-through performance event at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland on the summer solstice this Monday.
This year, in addition to exploring and writing reviews (follow these links for my 2009 and 2008 reviews), I will be performing with the Cornelius Cardew Choir. We will be performing a version of The Heart Chant by Pauline Oliveros that will span the entire evening (about four hours).
This participatory Deep Listening meditation is a gesture of sonic healing for all beings and circumstances that need healing. It was created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “Ah” is a vocal sound associated with the heart shakra.
Basically, the piece unfolds with members or the choir forming a circle, with each performer placing their right hand over his or her heart, the left hand on the heart position on the back of the person to the left, and then repeatedly singing the syllable “ah” in long steady tones for length of a breath. Choir members and audience participants (everyone is invited to participate) can enter or exit the circle at any time.
It is a very meditative and healing piece. I am planning to be part of the circle at the time leading up to sundown (8-8:30PM), and I have also chosen a recipient for whatever healing energy I create as part of the performance.
Today marks five years since I first brought Luna home from the Santa Cruz County animal shelter. Time certainly does pass quickly. We celebrate this anniversary (otherwise known as Luna’s “Gotcha Day”) with a look back at photographs from our five years together.
Here she is back in 2005.
and then in 2006
and finally in 2007.
That series of photos ends after we moved to San Francisco in 2008, but there is no shortage of images of Luna basking in sunlight. Here she is in 2008 (outdoors):
and 2009:
and finally this year:
(There are so many photos it can be hard to choose just one representative.)
Our friends at the Cat Blogosphere made an announcement today along with this nice banner:
Please join us in wishing Luna a “Happy 5th Gotcha Day!”
Sometimes things linger undone for a quite a while. And that is the case with reviewing the Quickening Moon Concert, which I am finally getting around to doing as the next Full Moon concert is about to happen. Basically, the process goes like this. I wait a few weeks to look at the video of my own performance with a fresh perspective. I review the videos. Then post them online. Then a few more weeks pass as life intervenes. So here were are, finally getting to it many “moons” later. Memories of course fade over time, but even going by my own recollections, there is much to recall fondly. Bottom line is that it was a really good performance, in fact I would consider it one of my best solo electronic sets to date. This was in no small part to the advance preparation, but also to the audience, which filled to the Luggage Store Gallery to standing-room only capacity!
This was also one of the larger setups, featuring the Octave CAT vintage analog synthesizer, E-MU Proteus 2000, DSI Evolver, Korg Kaoss Pad, a Mac laptop running Open Sound World and Max/MSP, and the Monome controller, along with an array of my folk instruments from China and India. Even the iPhone made an appearance as an instrument.
[Click images to enlarge.]
Of course, the highlight of the set was the premier of 月伸1, featuring improvised electronic music set against a video of Luna. Musically, I focused on the Octave CAT (seemed appropriate) with the other electronic instruments in a supporting role. You can see a full video of the performance of this piece below:
The music was improvised live, with some prepared guidelines. In this way, it was reminiscent of the live music performances from old silent films. I kept the music relatively sparse and maintained the focus on the visual elements, which moved back and forth between clips of Luna and abstract visual elements (you can read more about the video production here). The audience clearly responded to the video of Luna and the music, and their laughter at very points reminded just how funny a piece this was. It was easy to lose sight of that in the hours of very detailed and very technical preparation, and one of the delights of playing in front of a live audience. I also heard from people that could tell they were able to sense the affection for Luna that came through in the video, though the long shots and the breaks in the otherwise silent video where her voice came through.
The balance of the set leading up to 月伸1 featured various combinations of electronic and acoustic instruments. The monome was my main controller in several of the other pieces, including the opener that focused and live sample loops and patterns from the folk instruments.
I played the instruments live, and then replayed the samples in various patterns on the monome to create complex timbral and rhythmic patterns. I also used the monome in a later piece to control some very simple but musically interesting sound synthesis, as can be seen in this video.
The lights on the monome are visually compelling, but also provide a link for the audience between the actions (which are really just button pressing) and the music.
Several of the pieces including strong rhythmic elements, which helped propel the set forward – I even saw at least one person “grooving out” to one piece.
I replayed several of the pieces (but not the video) in another performance a few days later at the Meridian Gallery. I certainly hope I will have an opportunity to the video again as well.
My performance was followed by the premier of Polly Moller’s Genesis. Genesis is “a musical experiment in which the M-theory of the 11-dimensional universe combines with the inward and outward spiral of the Western magical tradition.” The 11 member ensemble represent the 11 dimensions (which include Universal Time, the three spatial dimensions, and seven others) who combine to bring the “New Universe” into being, as portrayed by Matt Davignon on drum machines.
[Photo by Tom Djll.]
Polly Moller conducted the piece, not from the traditional podium in front of the ensemble, but rather by walking in an inward and outward spiral among the performers. As she walks by, wind chimes in hand, different performers enter or exit. As the New Universe comes into being, Matt Davignon’s electronic performance emerges, culminating in an extended solo as the 11 performers representing the “parent dimensions” fade out.
Quite fortuitously, someone turned my video camera to face the ensemble, so I was able to capture some video of the performance. In the clips below, one can see the conducting by walking in a spiral, as well as parts of the New Universe solo.
At the end of April, I was visiting open studios along Islais Creek. I have been here several times before, and took advantage of the evening like to take photos along the creek. The main landmark, this old industrial crane, should be familiar to long-time readers of this site:
Walking around, I espied a small tuxedo cat walking around on the ground. Once it saw me, it immediately ran off and through a chain link fence into the neighboring lot. But he (or she) did come out soon, and I was able to get some photos through the fence:
The cat was definitely curious but wary . A few minutes later, the cat posed on some wooden objects that provided a geometric backdrop (once again, from behind the fence).
When I see cats among the old buildings or lots, they are often skittish and immediately run to hide. So it’s rare that I have a chance to intersect cats and industrial landscape this way.
Our next Reconnaissance Fly gig will be here on May 15.
We will be performance in the festival on Saturday, May 15, at 1PM at Beatnik Studios, 2421 17th Street @ Broadway, in Sacramento. Too bad we’re not at Luna’s Cafe.
This is the debut of our new quartet lineup, featuring myself, Polly Moller, Tim Walters on bass and electronics, and Noah Phillips on guitar. We have been perfecting our “Flower Futures” cycle featuring spoetry (poetry based on spam messages) and taking advantage of the sonic and musical options of our expanded lineup.
So if you are in the Greater Sacramento Metropolitan Area (?) on the 15th, do come check it out.
